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Elizabeth Smart details kidnapping in memoir, My Story

My Story ...Elizabeth Smart details her kidnapping from her bedroom in Salt Lake City when she was 14. Photo: AP

Minutes after 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her Utah bedroom in the dead of night, a police cruiser idled by along a neighbourhood street as she was forced to the ground at knifepoint. "Move and I will kill you!" her captor hissed.

It was one of several fleeting times Smart watched a rescue slip away during her nine-month ordeal, she recounts in My Story, a 308-page book released on Monday.

She writes that she was so terrified of the street preacher who kidnapped her that when she was rescued by police in a Salt Lake City suburb in March 2003, she only reluctantly identified herself.

Between the heartbreak of missed chances, Smart writes, she was treated as a sex object by Brian David Mitchell and as a slave by his wife, Wanda Barzee. She says they denied her food and water for days at a time.

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A US lawyer called it one of the kidnapping crimes of the century. Smart, a quiet, devout Mormon who played the harp and loved horses, vanished without a trace from her home high above Salt Lake City.

Smart, now 25, is married, living in Park City, finishing a music degree at Brigham Young University and travelling across the country giving speeches and doing advocacy work. She created the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to bring awareness to predatory crimes against children. For her, the book was another way to help bring nine months of brutality to a close.

"I want people to know that I'm happy in my life right now," Smart said. "I also, even more so, want to reach out to people who might not be in a good situation. Maybe they're in a situation that was similar to the one that I was in."

Smart said she hopes the book will shed some light on what was going through her head during what she called "nine months of hell".

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The Kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart

In the early hours of the morning in 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her well-to-do home in America by a deranged man who believed he was The Messiah. Despite many thinking she must be dead, she was discovered nine months later veiled in white walking with her captors just miles away.

Smart says she doesn't care to understand Mitchell, yet her book opens a window on his personality. He was a downtown Salt Lake City fixture in a robe and sandals who first laid a crooked eye on Smart when her mother offered the man $US5 and work at the family home.

At that moment, he resolved to take her as the second of a hoped-for five wives, he later told Smart.

Smart says Mitchell believed that anything in the world was his for the taking, and that he was a man who never cared for anyone even as he ranted about God. Smart calls him a "manipulative, antisocial and narcissistic paedophile".

Against that backdrop, the book chronicles a series of near-rescues, notably by a homicide detective who questioned Mitchell at a downtown Salt Lake City library. From under a table, Barzee clamped "iron" fingers into Smart's thigh. Smart, disguised in a dirty robe and face veil, remained silent as she remembered the couple's repeated threats to kill her family if she tried to save herself.

Her book reveals another near-rescue. Only days into the kidnapping, a helicopter hovered over the makeshift camp in the mountains just 8 kilometres from Smart's home where she was kept tethered to trees by steel cables.

She was forced inside a tent as the wash of the helicopter's rotors bent trees around them. After an eternal minute, she watched the helicopter slowly glide away.

It never returned. Mitchell took it as another favourable sign from God.

"Why didn't I cry out for help?" Smart reflects. The answer "comes down to fear".

Mitchell is serving two life terms after he was sentenced in 2011. A year earlier, Barzee was given 15 years for her role in Smart's kidnapping and sexual assault.

It was outside San Diego, where Mitchell took Barzee and Smart for winter at a homeless camp, that Smart devised a plan for freedom. She convinced Mitchell that God intended them to return to Salt Lake City.

On their arrival outside the city, police stopped the odd-looking trio, a middle-aged couple and young girl wearing filthy clothes, a grey wig and dark sunglasses, walking along a major metro street. Smart writes that before she identified herself, police seemed to know they had found her, asking, "Are you Elizabeth Smart?"

AP

Read Paul McGeough's exclusive Australian interview with Elizabeth Smart in Saturday's Good Weekend.